Keir Starmer getting a lot of hate on 'social media' because he didn't clap*for the NHS for long enough or with enough enthusiasm last night.

Quelle surprise. Meanwhile Matt Hancock appears to have escaped unscathed after telling an MP, who is also an NHS doctor, to 'watch her tone'.

And of course if he had insistently been the last one to finish clapping he would be facing a different set of accusations from the same sources.

I think The Don has the measure. Typical Cummings tactic, get his friendly editors to push out an idea and see how it "polls". Then decide if it should be policy or not.

I suppose in that way they can always "truthfully" claim they are being guided by "the science" , I.e. the science of polling.

No significant changes to the terms of the lockdown in Wales. We can exercise more than once a day and travel further when exercising.

Happy to see the Welsh government sticking to its guns.

https://twitter.com/freddiehickman_/...75914071093250

https://twitter.com/MarcStevenPhoto/...00439357734915

Footage embedded in tweets.

In other news, the Torygraph's front page splash tomorrow is bigging up Starmer for advocating for the "VE Day generation" in care homes.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if he plays his cards right and if circumstances are otherwise favourable, he really could win the next election. If he's very, very careful, and if Boris is too Boris for them, he genuinely could get the right-wing press on board, at least a little.

The sight of that Torygraph headline caused my eyebrows to head North.....

Too fast a thread to follow closely, and I'm not sure where this fits best, but I saw an amusing take on the crisis - how differently we would look at it if the virus were the size of dinosaurs:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/...-jurassic-park

And of course some people in the comments still desperately trying to spin it into Starmer doing something wrong.

Starmer getting stick now for his daughter being 'over the road' and 'breaking lockdown' and not being just outside the house.

Yeah the only good thing is that it doesn't seem to be getting a lot of traction, I think the photographer stepping in so promptly means this will fizzle out.

The worst UK civilian death tolls;

- 1349 Plague 3 million plus
- 1918 Spanish flu 228,000
- 1666 Plague 100,000
- 1945 WWII 67,100
- 2020 Covid-19 30,000 plus

If you use the excess deaths figure, it is over 38,000.

I can not speak for other countries, but the UK did contact tracing early on. That the contact tracing did not control the outbreak is not evidence it did not occur, not that it was not done properly. But is I think that many cases are mildly symptomatic and there were multiple introductions to the UK, and that cases had spread widely before they were identified for contact tracing. In South Korea, there was essentially a point source outbreak within a closed community that is very different from e.g. the UK experience. In addition studies show that given the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing alone is unlikely to be a successful control measure, it needs to be combined with social distancing to reduce transmission. South Korea had both contact tracing and social distancing simultaneously. The UK had contact tracing then social distancing. The failure was not in the contact tracing process, but because there was not social distancing.

How much of that is marketing baloney?

How does a syringe "expire"? Or a needle? Does it suddenly start rusting in its airtight storage? Sounds to me like drugs & food with best before dates that are there solely to get people to throw good supplies away and buy more.

Or it relates to how long the packaging is expected to last before it starts to deteriorate and fails to maintain a sterile environment.

My understanding is that on expiry some items should be tested and if they are fine, a new expiry date can be given.

Expiry does not necessary mean bin, it means check it to make sure it is still OK. Lots of things, from fire extinguishers to electrical items get periodically checked and given a new date when the next check should take place.

The figure you give for civilian deaths in WW2 are those attributable to enemy action. The deaths due to TB during WW2 were about 140,000, the excess mortality due to the rise in TB during the war was about the same as deaths due to enemy action. Earlier in the century 1:4 deaths in the UK were from TB. Tuberculosis killed one quarter of people in the UK in the the early part of the twentieth century, not just one year, but year after year. None of these epidemics you reference remotely compare with TB. 1.5 million people will die of TB this year globally. The same number last year and the same number next year. This for a curable disease.

Global deaths so far this year from covid-19 270,000, from TB 625,000 deaths.

Apologist's work is hard and never ending.

And so it begins...

We had a bloke banging on the doors of people that didn't come out to clap last night and again today when we were supposed to come out for VE day and sing Ver a Lynn songs.

I thought about that, but plastic takes a bloody long time to deteriorate even in the sea and subject to sunlight, so I'd expect the life in a storage facility to be quite a lot of years.

UK, determined to keep the stable door shut a month too late, is about to introduce a 14-day quarantine for air arrivals. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52594023

I would have thought a 14-day quarantine for people leaving would be more sensible.

When Ron White made the sentence "You can't fix stupid." famous, he had no idea he was making an epidemiological prediction.

And the ignorant's opinions firm and unyielding.

Arguably more altruistic, and perhaps a bit kinder. This would only be effective if there was an international consensus to adopt this approach, so having observed a quarantine for 2 weeks in your own country before leaving and being disease free, it would mean you would be exempt from quarantine on arrival.

It would certainly be a much better approach than quarantine on arrival; definitely a good idea. You should work hard on getting the world to adopt your idea.

It depends how you define "deteriorate", a lot of thin plastics used for packaging can become brittle relatively quickly (single digit years) making them fail as protective packaging, while remaining detectable as pollution for decades.

:D

But more seriously, quarantining air arrivals makes sense for a country that has eradicated or is close to eradicating the virus. UK, not so much.

Getting passive aggressive stares and occasional tutting from people who are also not in their house is the new normal!

I can’t currently make much sense of the quarantine proposal not starting for three more weeks or even starting at all this late, but it’s dominating the news this morning so has probably already achieved its real purpose.

A lot of twitter accounts created over the last few days decrying the 'lockdown' and even social distancing in the UK. Some even attacking the nurses and doctors for being useless and letting people die.

Seems the next stage of the govt propaganda is surfacing.

Nobody that I can see in my road goes out and claps, perhaps some of my neighbours are brighter than I thought!

Nobody clapped round my way the first week, then it took off, but it seemed to have died down again this week. Perhaps I just didn't hear it.

The Daily Mail is blaming "the blob" for "sabotaging" school re-openings.

These are the demands, quoted from the article itself:

This is being painted as unreasonable. Both by the Mail and, allegedly, Tory ministers.

They're also crediting Starmer as being behind it. Given how many people in the country will have a newfound appreciation for teachers thanks to having to educate their own children over the last month and a bit, I think this is more likely to make Starmer's stock rise than fall.

Lots of people laughing at "Stay Alert" but after only four hours of careful vigilance I wrestled a virus to the ground. Ok it looked like a spider but this really does save lives

Seems to me that "Stay Alert" actually means "Obey the Rules" but the rules we are meant to now obey when we see "Stay Alert" are even more wishy washy and lax than they were before, and bound to be abused by idiots.

“Stay alert by working at home if you can”
Because working at work makes you lazy and not likely to be as alert?
What does this garbage mean??!

I think it all means
"lets be vague enough so that people think the lockdown is over, then when the 2nd wave hits we can deny responsibility by pointing to the fact that we never said the lockdown is over"

Stay Alert seems to be nothing but a rebranding exercise, mainly focused on persuading employers to pull people off furlough and allow the government to refocus spending where its really needed, bailing out companies run by billionaires that barely pay any taxes in the UK.